Understand built-in project filters

It’s important to understand how a filter is set up so you can be sure you’re seeing what you expect to see. You might think Projects I own shows you projects where you’re the project owner, while Projects I’m on shows projects where you’re on the project team. As you’ll see, there’s more to it than that. The best way to really know how a filter is working is to open it up and take a look.

Let’s start with Projects I own. It’s a simple filter with only one filter rule, to only show projects where the logged in user is the project owner.

It’s important to note that this filter does not take into account the status of the project. With the Projects I own filter, you will see statuses of the project, including completed projects and dead projects. So you’ll just see all the projects that you own.

Now let’s take a look at Projects I’m on. You’ll notice right away that there are four filter rules, all of which are OR filters. This means that any project that meets any of those four conditions appears in your project list. The first filter checks the project users list for the ID of the logged in user.

Project users is a list of all work front users assigned to a project, whether they are the project owner or someone assigned to only one task.

This is also referred to as the project team. The second filter rule checks the entered by ID. This is the ID of the user who created the project. So if you create a project and make someone else the owner, it’s still going to show up on the Projects I’m on list. The third filter rule makes you see all the projects where you’re the project sponsor. And the fourth filter rule makes sure you see all the projects where you’re the project owner. Again, we can see that this filter does not filter by status. You will see all projects, not just those that are current.

Finally, take a look at the active filter. What does it mean for a project to be active? According to this filter, it means the project has a status that equates with current, planning or approved. In progress is just a custom status that equates with current. So it just means current.

What if your organization has a different definition of active? If you’re a system administrator, you can remove a built-in filter from the filter list and replace it with one of your own. I’ll show you how to do this. Let’s say at your organization, you consider a project to be active if it is either current or in planning, but not if it’s just approved.

We’ll create a new active filter that works this way, then replace the built-in active filter with it. Start by editing the built-in status so it has the current and planning statuses only.

So we’ll delete approved here. Then save it by clicking the save as new button. You’ll need to provide a new name. Active 2 will work nicely. Now that you’ve created the filter, you can share with users by going to setup. Like I said, you have to be a system administrator to do this. Go to setup, interface, filters. We’ll change the filter to show all. Built-in filters are system filters.

Custom filters are the ones you can make.

And all include them all on the same list.

If we turn off grouping by object type, it’ll make it a little bit easier to find what we want. The project object type is what we’re looking for. Here’s the active filter, the one that is visible system-wide currently. And down here is the active 2 filter, the one created by Roy Campbell. It is not visible system-wide yet.

So what we’re going to do is we’re going to choose this filter. And then we have the option to disable system-wide. And now we’re going to choose our new filter. And we’re going to make this visible system-wide by clicking enable system-wide.

So now this is the one that’s going to show up in your list. And we can rename it while we’re at it here. We’ll rename it to active.

Now everyone in your organization will be using the new version of the active filter for projects.